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9:21 · 1,478 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The three songs everyone knows were written as an attempt at the poppiest possible music, meant to mock pop, and the joke then overshadowed everything the band did afterwards.
▶ 00:00:31
- Their own assessment before this record was that the previous two had gone over so badly they would never reach the first album's level again.
▶ 00:01:21
- After the 2014 tour they stopped entirely, Ben Goldwasser moving to Los Angeles and Andrew VanWyngarden to Queens, and spent a year on everything except music.
▶ 00:01:44
- They restarted long distance over email, sending each other chords and instrumentals, which dragged on with little to show for it.
▶ 00:02:02
- Meeting at Tarbox Road they dropped the loose improvisational method of the last two records and returned to the debut's method, each arriving with fully formed ideas.
▶ 00:02:20
- Dave Fridman came back on production, but the turn is credited to Patrick Wimberly, who talked them up when the ideas were good and steered them down the promising ones.
▶ 00:02:37
- A two-day open jam session brought players in to lay down parts, and the track James grew out of an acid trip, with James Richardson playing French horn on it.
▶ 00:02:53
- Ariel Pink taught them to write words on the spot and trust them, improvising a lyric in minutes out of a conversation from the hallway, which is where the confidence came back.
▶ 00:03:25
- They came out with roughly 40 song ideas, and the first single in four years disproved their own claim that they could not write pop songs.
▶ 00:03:42
- The last single marked their exit from Columbia and the first release on their own label, which closes the loop on a band that started out calling itself The Management as a jab at the industry's business side.
▶ 00:07:17